Micro-aerial vehicles at an insect scale would represent a phenomenal improvement in discrete reconnaissance vehicles. The abilities to rapidly explore small spaces and to exploit contextual camouflage are two apparent advantages. But reducing the scale of flapping wing flight has numerous challenges, for example, feedback processing and wing actuation. Moreover, applications for micro-aerial vehicles may have stringent weight limits (e.g., on the order of 1 gram for onboard sensing and computational hardware). Limitations on size, weight, and/or power for the onboard sensing and computation hardware can make traditional state estimation and feedback approaches prohibitively heavy and/or computationally intensive. As such, commercially-available avionics cannot be used. Similarly, the high bandwidth requirements of controlling flapping wings create demands that traditional lightweight servos are unable to achieve.